by Harlan Wolff
Carl smiled to let him know that he had got what he wanted from him. Art realized what had happened and that Carl had made him lose his temper on purpose. Instead of continuing to be angry he became calm and smiled at Carl.
“What are you really up to Carl? You are not writing a history book on Vietnam I assume?”
“Working on staying alive Art. Mostly I’m just working on staying alive. Your friend was a good investigator. Focus on the young girls Art. You’ll be able to work out the rest from there.”
Carl paid his bill and was getting up to leave. Carl was the centre of attention and all the barflies were interested in the man who had taken on their hero and was still standing.
“If Inman is really out there and knows you are after him staying alive won’t be easy. Take care of yourself Carl and don’t start your car without looking under the hood first.”
“Thanks Art,” Carl said as he stood up and paid his bill.
As he passed Art on his way out he heard him speak into his drink so quietly that only Carl could hear.
“Get that scumbag for me Carl. If he is still alive somebody better nail him. Like permanently, for all the widows and orphans.”
“Don’t forget the grieving parents Art. There are a lot of them too,” Carl said with his back to the audience passing Art at the bar as he pushed through the door into the morning sunlight.
Carl had got what he wanted. He had found out where Victor Boyle fitted into the story and, maybe more importantly, that Boyle had probably been Inman’s sidekick in his murder games. He assumed that Boyle had needed a leader and couldn’t pursue his sport without the senior partner. It begged the question as to what Boyle had missed the most. Had he spent twenty years chasing the money or had he wanted back into Inman’s murder games? Things had started to get interesting. The case was not only about a serial killer; it was also about money, lots and lots of money. Carl would stick with it no matter what. Just because he sometimes believed in good old-fashioned justice didn’t mean that he was above the money.
Chapter 14
It was time for another drink and he needed a safe place where he could sit and think. There was another bar he had used to drink at a little further along Suriwongse Road called Candy’s and it was usually open. Carl briskly walked the hundred meters there. Candy’s didn’t look open to the people passing by and only the handful of people who knew the place well would bother to try the door. As usual the door was unlocked so Carl opened it and went inside.
There were seven members of staff in the bar looking half asleep, and Bob the Australian owner was sitting at the end of the bar on his own. On his left shoulder, as always, was a large white bird that walked backwards and forwards staring angrily around the bar with dark beady eyes. The bird was called Ned Kelly and was famous for his ability to say ‘suck my dick’ in several languages.
Two of the youngest girls were still wearing their pink pyjamas and had faces smeared with talcum powder. These two teenagers were sitting at the sofa furthest inside the bar and near the door to the toilet. This was also the door to the upper floors where the girls slept on mats on the floor. They were eating rice and an assortment of spicy strong smelling things from several plastic plates, picking the food up with rice they had pressed into balls with their hands. The bar was also where they lived.
Two of the older girls in their day clothes got up from the nearest sofa and walked to the bar where Carl was sitting himself down. These would be the two that hadn’t made any money the night before. The girls liked to spread money around so everybody got a chance when they were hungry. There was less fighting that way. Catfights between bar girls were not a pleasant spectacle.
“About time you put in an appearance,” Bob, the owner, said to Carl.
Bob was a thin man from some angles. He had a long face and skinny arms and legs. His belly had betrayed him and was another story. He had the hugely distended middle of a man who had spent most of his existence drinking for a living. As usual he was badly dressed in the cheap copy clothing that was sold in the Patpong night market. Carl wondered how he was able to buy clothing from Patpong as Bob lived upstairs in an apartment on the top floor and, as far as Carl was aware, hadn’t left the building in years. Maybe he sent one of his staff out to buy his clothes. Somebody was obviously robbing him. The clothes he was wearing were the cheapest looking Carl had ever seen. Maybe Bangkok had copied the copies.
“How’s business?” Carl asked him.
“Sydney or the bush, mate,” he replied in Australian.
“Like always then.”
“Fuckin’ right, mate.”
“Where’s the old mamasan?” Carl asked. The old mamasan had worked for Bob and looked after him and his staff for over ten years.
“Some bloke who made loads of money working the mines in Australia came in, rooted her rotten and buggered her senseless, so she married him. He was my best customer and I really miss him,” Bob said laughing loudly. “They bought a house in Pattaya and filled it with sex toys from eBay.”
“Glad to see romance is still alive and well and living at Candy’s bar.”
“My bloody oath. They should call me Cupid. It is fucking hard to run a business when the silly cows keep falling for the customers and running off and marrying them. If you knew how many marriages this place is responsible for,” Bob said, minus his laugh. “Do you know Carl, every man, no matter how old, ugly, or stupid he is, has some silly cow somewhere that is just waiting for him to walk up to her so she can fall in love with him?”
“Guess that means we will eventually be all right then Bob.”
“Women! Don’t bloody understand them.”
The girls started massaging Carl’s arms in the hope that he would buy them a drink. The problem was he couldn’t even hold a drink as his arms were being held firmly by the massaging girls. He ordered drinks anyway, one for him and one for each of the girls.
“Sorry to hear about your car,” Bob told him.
“What about my car?’ Carl asked.
“There were two plain clothes policemen in here last night looking for you. They said they needed to let you know that someone had crashed into your Porsche in a Patpong car park.”
“What did you tell them?” Carl asked in a put-on calm voice.
“I told them the truth, that I hadn’t seen you in almost a year.”
“Then what happened?”
“They buggered off of course. I don’t like police in my bar.”
“Were they in uniform?”
“No, mate, like I said, undercover blokes. Safari suits with a bulge at the waistband. You know; carrying heat.”
“If they come back don’t say you saw me.”
“You in trouble, mate?”
“Pissed off some rich bastard by shagging his wife,” Carl lied fluently.
“So nothing new then, sport,” he said with great amusement.
Carl moved one of the girl’s hands to his back so he had a free hand to lift his drink. Carl felt the need to drink come over him again as he had been given yet another thing to think about. He had been feeling the need to drink a lot lately. One of the girls smiled at him and moved her hand down to massage his balls. They could rub him anywhere they liked as long as they kept their hands off the pockets with the stacks of money in them.
“Do you want a blowjob?” she whispered in his ear.
Carl imagined himself with his trousers around his ankles, back to the wall and facing the door as his hunters crashed into the bar. It wasn’t so much the thought of a shootout whilst half naked that bothered him. What really worried him was being posthumously infamous. Carl imagined the headline, ‘The Stiff with a Stiffy’ or ‘He Died with his Boots On’ or ‘Private Detective Blown Away’. It was vanity but that was really not how Carl wanted to be remembered.
“I can’t,” Carl told her, “I am a Rotarian.”
“You can,” she replied hungrily, “all the other Rotarians do. They come here every Thursd
ay afternoon.”
There was no answer to that so he ignored the original question. He might change his mind after a few drinks anyway. Your reputation becomes less important when you are drunk, or so he had heard. The trick was to keep drinking and talking normally in spite of his erection, not always an easy thing to do as her hand was massaging all the right parts. So Carl thought about a bullet in the back of the head and ordered everybody another drink.
“What I always wanted to ask you is how did you find that gang last year?” Bob asked.“Four days wasn’t it, that it took you to find them?”
“I did what I always do Bob.”
“And what’s that, mate?”
“I stuck a pin in a map,” Carl said with a grin.
“Fuck you,” Bob said angrily.
“I thought that was her job,” Carl replied nodding his head in the direction of the girl that was making eyes at him whilst rubbing his dick and balls.
The owner pointed at a sign behind the cashier’s head. It said, “Whores are people that do well for money what other people do badly for love.” He laughed out loud again at his own wit.
“No chance you will be getting married then,” Carl told him.
“My bloody oath mate. But seriously, I want to know how you find people that nobody else can find.”
Carl thought for a while before he answered. “I think it is more empathy, more getting my hands dirty and a lot less Hollywood than other investigators.”
“I still don’t get it,” were Bob’s final words regarding the matter. He had resigned himself to being a brothel keeper and accepted that he would never reach the dizzy lows of being a Bangkok private inquiry agent.
Bob had the life he wanted. He owned a bar around the corner from Patpong. He got drunk with his friends every night and could always find a woman or two to look after him in his drunken stupors. He thought he was in heaven. Maybe he was, but then why did so many people in his line of work drink themselves to death? Carl always wondered if they brought the unhappiness with them or picked it up later. Carl occasionally liked visiting the Patpong life but had long ago stopped wanting to live there.
“Speaking of marriage Carl,” Bob said, laughing again, “When are you planning your next famous disaster?”
“I’m done with marriage. It would be doomed to failure anyway. I don’t like Pattaya and I don’t have an eBay account.”
“You’re better off single mate. There’s lots of perks to being free. Take little Ann there, she can suck start a Harley Davidson and she never says no to anybody.”
“I will bear that in mind.”
Meanwhile, it was decision time, and Carl didn’t want to walk out onto the main street with an erection. He gave the girls a hundred baht each and thanked them. It was a polite way of saying, ‘get your hands off me please’. He asked for the bill hoping it wouldn’t arrive too quickly. He needed time to get back to normal before he walked out into the daylight.
His erection problem was solved. It was immediately demolished when Bart Barrows crashed through the door and took a seat next to him at the bar. The two girls in pink pyjamas had gone upstairs, the other two were eating at the table they had vacated, and the only remaining girls were gathered around Carl.
“What’s going on here Bob and what’s that white bird?” Bart asked as the bartender put his brand of beer in front of him.
“You know what it is. It’s a cockatoo,” Bob told him.
“Pity it’s not a cunt or two or you might be doing some business in here,” Bart barked as he looked around the bar unhappily.
“That’s all right, it’s your lucky day. I was just leaving,” Carl told Bart, who sipped on a bottle of beer, relieved that he was not going to be sitting alone for long.
“You leaving already, mate?” Bob asked unhappily, which was understandable as Carl was his best customer so far that day. Bart Barrows could make a bottle of beer last a very long time.
“Got to go back to the office,” Carl lied. He didn’t have an office.
“Remember, work is the curse of the drinking class,” Bob told him as he pointed at another sign behind the bar, this one quoting Oscar Wilde.
“How can I forget?” Carl told him as he left.
The street looked safe but Carl was understandably paranoid. He walked back into Patpong and went through the first open door, a Thai restaurant on the south side of the street. These places all had back doors that came out onto a lane that ran behind Patpong. He made sure he wasn’t followed in and then left by the back door making sure that he wasn’t followed out. There was nobody shadowing him so he relaxed and walked along the alley back toward Suriwongse Road. He was in a high stakes game and like all games it was fun as long as you were winning.
Carl performed a few more counter surveillance tricks and then took a taxi back to Sukhumvit. He got out of the taxi at the entrance to one of the many tall office buildings that line Soi Asoke, the main thoroughfare that runs from Sukhumvit to Phetchburi Road. Carl took the lift to the 24th floor where Damien Southerby’s supposedly secret office was located.
On the 24th floor there was a security door that the Israeli Embassy would have been proud of and a security camera that watched the whole area between the lift and the reinforced door. Carl looked into the camera and pressed the buzzer. He waited, and waited, and then Carl waited some more. He imagined the hyper paranoid activity that would have been going on the other side of the door. He was fully aware that Damien did not approve of visitors and his unexpected arrival would cause him much distress. Fifteen minutes later the door opened and Damien was standing in front of Carl with a strained and curious expression on his face.
“What’re you doing here and how the fuck did you know where it was?” Damien asked him.
“I just followed the twinkle of diamond cufflinks. Now, let me in and give me some coffee. I have a problem you can help me with Damien.”
Damien waved his hand for Carl to follow him. As Carl entered, the door automatically shut itself behind him. The inside of the office was bigger than he had expected. The main floor was open plan except for partitions, desks and headsets that were linked to electronic boxes. The boxes provided access to the Internet for the crowd of spotty youths to make their long distance phone calls. The noise reminded Carl of a large flock of geese as one hundred bonus-driven men, some sitting and some standing, yelled into their headsets trying to find the next deal.
Carl had imagined that these latter-day snake oil salesmen would spend their days sweet-talking little old ladies into investing in their rigged foreign exchange program. The reality was aggressive salesmen screaming abuse at dentists, doctors, architects and other professional types sitting at their desks in legitimate offices on the other side of the world.
As Carl walked past the badly dressed, overpaid runaways from their small towns in America, Europe and Australia, Carl heard things like ‘Who wears the fucking trousers in your house?’, ‘Call yourself a man?’, ‘You have to grow balls to make money’, and Carl’s all-time favourite, ‘I am going out in my Ferrari tonight to drink Champagne and fuck models two at a time. What are you doing tonight?’
Damien led Carl across the full length of the telemarketing floor to his office. The door closed behind them and there was silence. Damien’s office was soundproofed and separated from the outside world by thick floor to ceiling glass. Damien could play Fagin in peace whilst keeping a close eye on his room full of Dickensian urchins.
“What do you think?” he asked Carl.
“I think I should have learnt to pick a pocket or two.”
“I rarely understand what you are talking about. You are good at your job with a tendency toward simplification, which I appreciate. However, when I talk to you on other matters I never know what the fuck you are talking about.”
“I’ve a problem understanding myself most of the time too. Shall we get down to business?”
“OK. What brings you here scaring the shit out of my staff? Fuck
, we thought we were being raided. I swear my star salesman’s pissed his pants.”
“Sorry about that but I don’t have a lot of time. I need an anonymous offshore structure with a virgin bank account attached. I need it now so there is no time for lawyers. I know you will need backup bank accounts in your back pocket at all times to replace the ones shut down by the authorities as they become aware of your activities. I am guessing that bank accounts are getting shut down all the time so you will always be in possession of at least three corporate structures and three virgin bank accounts.”
“You know far too much,” Damien said unhappily.
“That’s why you like me Damien. Anyone else would be here to extort money from you. I’m here to ask for a favour and pay a fair price in cash on the table for it. I need the bank account, preferably in a morally loose jurisdiction, with all passwords and security devices. I will pay you cash now for whatever it originally cost you to set up and, and should I be successful in my endeavour, I will give you a very serious Patek Philippe watch as a gift from me to you, it will be a mark of friendship. I won’t insult you by offering you money I know you don’t need. But Damien, a man can never have too many beautiful watches, plus there are times in everybody’s life when a friend like me can be worth a lot more than money.”
